Selene Arfini seeks to resolve a long-standing paradoxParadox and the seemingly exclusive dichotomy between knowledgeKnowledgeand ignoranceIgnorance (also Aching Ignorance) through the concept of serendipity. How can we find new knowledgeKnowledge when we do not know what are we looking for? This question is a brief version of Meno’s or the Learner’s ParadoxParadox, which still manages to be upsetting in contemporary philosophy, despite having been discussed since Plato’s times. Arfini believes that the paradoxParadox still upsets because we strongly connect the (...) explicit act of searching to the event of finding, in the same way as we describe the ideas of knowledgeKnowledge and ignorance as opposite and unrelated. Arfini argues that these assumptions live on, thanks to a cluster of misconceptions that still envelop the ideas of discoveryDiscovery (also, Scientific Discovery), which could be overcome by utilizing insights from recent studies in serendipity, and by reframing ignoranceIgnorance (also Aching Ignorance)from a cognitiveCognition, Cognitive (-offloading) (-trajectory) (-probatonics) perspective. (shrink)

a brief history of the study of ignorance. There is a lack of serious investigation into ignorance: apart from the apophatic tradition in the ancient world and the Middle Ages and the more recent fields of agnotology, philosophy of race, and feminist philosophy, ignorance itself has received little philosophical attention. It is then laid out how the field that one would expect to have studied ignorance in detail, namely, epistemology, has failed to do so. The chapter (...) also explores why this could be the case. Subsequently, it is explained what is new about this book and how this fills the important gap in the study of ignorance: it develops and applies an epistemology of ignorance. Finally, it gives a brief overview of the chapters ahead. (shrink)

The aim of this chapter is to examine some of the key contributions of feminist philosophers of science to the study of ignorance. First, I provide a brief introduction to agnotology and its critical stance to traditional epistemology. Then, I illustrate how the study of ignorance can serve as a tool for feminist epistemology through an examination of case studies. In the third section, I examine the importance of ignorance studies for the feminist project in (...) philosophy of science. Finally, in the fourth section I suggest some new directions worth pursuing in this area. (shrink)

This article presents a novel theoretical approach to explore nurse executives’ paradoxical identity and agency of executive and nurse in homecare organizations. This complex phenomenon has yet to be well theorized or analyzed. Through a synthesis of literature, we demonstrate that Critical Management Studies, as informed by Foucault, and the Sociology of Ignorance, can create a different understanding of the complex interplay between knowledge and nonknowledge (ignorance) that positions nurse executives in both influential and precarious ways in (...) homecare organizations. This theoretical framework has the potential to allow for the explicit exploration of nurse executives’ strategic epistemic and discursive positioning and highlights hierarchal power structures within homecare organizations. We posit that this framework, that spans nursing, management and sociology disciplines, sets a different understanding of homecare organizations as epistemic landscapes, exposing institutional knowledge and ignorance dynamics that remain largely concealed and unchallenged, yet are integral to understanding nurse executives’ epistemic agency. (shrink)

In principle, all patients deserve to receive optimal medical treatment equally. However, in situations in which there is scarcity of time or resources, medical treatment must be prioritized based on a triage. The conventional guidelines of medical triage mandate that treatment should be provided based solely on medical necessity regardless of any non-medical value-oriented considerations (“worst-first”). This study empirically examined the influence of value-oriented considerations on medical triage decision–making. Participants were asked to prioritize medical treatment relating to four case scenarios (...) of an emergency situation resulting from a car collision. The cases differ by situational characteristics pertaining to the at-fault driver, which were related to culpability attribution. In three case scenarios most participants gave priority to the most severely injured individual, unless the less severely injured individual was their brother. Nevertheless, in the aftermath of a vehicle-ramming terror attack most participants prioritized the less severely injured individual (“victim-first”). Our findings indicate that when caregivers are presented with concrete highly conflictual triage situations their choices may be based on value-oriented considerations related to contextual characteristics of the emergency situation. Philosophical and practical ramifications of our findings are discussed. (shrink)

Ignorance and Imagination advances a novel way to resolve the central philosophical problem about the mind: how it is that consciousness or experience fits into a larger naturalistic picture of the world. The correct response to the problem, Stoljar argues, is not to posit a realm of experience distinct from the physical, nor to deny the reality of phenomenal experience, nor even to rethink our understanding of consciousness and the language we use to talk about it. Instead, we should (...) view the problem itself as a consequence of our ignorance of the relevant physical facts, Stoljar shows that this change of orientation is well motivated historically, empirically, and philosophically, and that it has none of the side effects it is sometimes thought to have. The result is a philosophical perspective on the mind that has a number of far-reaching consequences: for consciousness studies, for our place in nature, and for the way we think about the relationship between philosophy and science. (shrink)

We apply the analysis that we have developed over the course of several publications on the significance of ignorance for decision-making, especially in surrogate (and, thus, in political) contexts, to political decision-making, such as it has been, during the COVID-19 pandemic (see Scheall 2019; Crutchfield and Scheall 2019; Scheall and Crutchfield 2020; Scheall 2020). Policy responses to the coronavirus constitute a case study of the problem of policymaker ignorance. We argue that political responses to the virus cannot be (...) explained by assuming that the interests of policymakers were at loggerheads with those of their constituents at the beginning of the crisis. In order to explain the responses of policymakers, it is necessary to recognize the effects of relevant ignorance on their incentives to pursue different policy objectives. We discuss the knowledge that policymakers required at the start of the pandemic in order to deliberately realize the goal of limiting overall human suffering and the spontaneous forces that could have facilitated the realization of this goal. The problem of policymaker ignorance implies that policymakers have not earnestly pursued the goal of limiting overall suffering due to the novel coronavirus, but have repeatedly resorted to the pursuit of relatively less epistemically burdensome goals. The problem of policymaker ignorance explains why policymakers have focused primarily on limiting one kind of suffering – physical suffering due to the virus – and have mostly ignored related kinds of suffering, i.e., the economic, sociological, psychological, and physical suffering caused by policies to limit physical suffering from the virus. The problem of policymaker ignorance also helps to explain why policymakers relied on the relatively blunt instrument of economic lockdown rather than more focused protection policies, and why they continue to resort to lockdowns, despite the emerging scientific evidence of their ineffectiveness at mitigating physical suffering due to the virus. (shrink)

For decades, scholars have recognized that most citizens have little or no political knowledge, and that it is in fact rational for the average voter to make little or no effort to acquire political information. Rational ignorance is fully compatible with the so‐called “paradox of voting” because it will often be rational for citizens to vote, but irrational for them to become well informed. Furthermore, rational ignorance leads not only to inadequate acquisition of political information, but also to (...) ineffective use of the information that citizens do possess. The combination of these two problems has fundamental implications for a variety of issues in public policy and international affairs. (shrink)

Virgin birth controversy enjoys a privileged status in the history of anthropology and reflects the exceptional interest anthropology takes in “biological facts” of human procreation. In the widest sense, this controversy centers around procreative beliefs, or more precisely, the “discovery” of people who were considered to be ignorant of the facts of physiological paternity and the causal relationship between copulation and pregnancy (in humans). This paper offers an overview of the main theoretical approaches and an insight into the variety of (...) empirical findings presented by the numerous participants in the virgin birth debate. It especially focuses on a critical assessment of the provided argumentation on the subject of procreative ignorance, as well as the matter of interpretation of ethnographical facts and an analysis of the meaning of “biological facts” from a cross-cultural perspective. (shrink)

Willful ignorance is an important concept in criminal law and jurisprudence, though it has not received much discussion in philosophy. When it is mentioned, however, it is regularly assumed to be a kind of self-deception. In this article I will argue that self-deception and willful ignorance are distinct psychological kinds. First, some examples of willful ignorance are presented and discussed, and an analysis of the phenomenon is developed. Then it is shown that current theories of self-deception give (...) no support to the idea that willful ignorance is a kind of self-deception. Afterwards an independent argument is adduced for excluding willful ignorance from this category. The crucial differences between the two phenomena are explored, as are the reasons why they are so easily conflated. (shrink)

Robert Proctor has argued that ignorance or non-knowledge can be fruitfully divided into at least three categories: ignorance as native state or starting point; ignorance as lost realm or selective choice; and ignorance as strategic ploy or active construct. This chapter explores Proctor’s second category, ignorance as selective choice. When scientists investigate poorly understood phenomena, they have to make selective choices about what questions to ask, what research strategies and metrics to employ, and what language (...) to use for describing the phenomena. This chapter focuses especially on the selective choice of language for describing and categorizing phenomena in the face of uncertainty. Using several case studies from recent pollution research, I show that linguistic choices are especially significant when we have severely limited knowledge, because those choices can emphasize and highlight some aspects of our limited knowledge rather than others. These selective emphases can in turn influence societal decision making, and they can exacerbate the selectivity of our knowledge by further steering scientific research in some directions rather than others. I conclude with some suggestions for developing scientific language in socially responsible ways, even in the face of significant ignorance and uncertainty. (shrink)

A long line of epistemologists including Sosa (2021), Feldman (2002), and Chisholm (1977) have argued that, at least for a certain class of questions that we take up, we should (or should aim to) close inquiry iff by closing inquiry we would meet a unique epistemic standard. I argue that no epistemic norm of this general form is true: there is not a single epistemic standard that demarcates the boundary between inquiries we are forbidden and obligated to close. In short, (...) such norms are false because they are insensitive to the potentially ambitious epistemic goals that agents may permissibly bring to bear on an inquiry. Focusing particularly on knowledge-oriented versions of the norm, I argue that ignorance has a positive role to play in epistemic life by licensing prolonged inquiry into questions that we especially care about. (shrink)

In this essay, I approach issues of post-truth and fake news from the perspective of “ignorance studies,” a fairly recent multidisciplinary area of scholarship. It looks at epistemology from the opposite direction adopted by traditional theorists of knowledge, seeing if analyzing ignorance can shed light on knowledge and truth in new ways. After looking at examples of ignorance from a common-sense standpoint informed by my dual careers as a philosopher and a journalist, I argue in the (...) first half that journalists, like philosophical pragmatists and scientists, make the best knowledge judgments they can at a particular time, conscious that future context and circumstances may alter their judgments. Journalists, I note, also often choose to be ignorant of less important facts, part of the inevitable selectivity required when covering news. In the second half of the essay, I seek to address a fresh, traditionally philosophical issue in journalism—the widespread use by reporters of casual generalizations not backed up by rigorous empirical investigation. I suggest that readers may tolerate such generalizations because they recognize them to function rhetorically as something other than strict truth claims. At the same time, many thinkers, from Machiavelli to William Blake, have heavily criticized generalization, and most people repudiate insulting generalizations, such as racial slurs. I end by strongly advising greater scrutiny of journalistic generalizations by both philosophers and media professionals. (shrink)

The debate between Izarn, a Dominican and inquisitor, and the Catharian repentant bishop Sicart de Figueiras raises the question of the so-called ignorance of the Catharians, especially in biblical studies. If the Interrogatio Iohannis, one of the Catharian sources and an apocryphal and gnostic gospel, appears during the debate, the exegetical tradition is also present in the myth of fallen angels. In one of his main accusations Izarn evokes the metempsychosis revealing the antiques doctrines influence on the Catharians. (...) Therefore, the heretics expressed a large number of knowledge in the vernacular language receptive to the most humbles and the illiterates persons. This has been their strength face to the rational and scholarly theology acquired from books by the Catholic clergy. (shrink)

Since the 1970s, researchers have focused on visual joint attention as a way to observe and operationalize joint attention. I will argue that this methodological choice has neglected other modalities and as a consequence might be missing important elements in the account of the development of JA and the evolutionary history of JA. I argue that by including other modes of interaction, such as touch, we open the possibility of finding that non-human primates and younger human infants engage in basic (...) forms of JA. Moreover, I argue that touch, as a proximal mode of perception, is the ontogenetic precursor of social communication. (shrink)

This study addressed the question of whether L2 learners are able to utilize verb’s argument structure information in online structural analysis. Previous L2 research has shown that L2 learners have difficulty in using verb’s intransitive information to guide online syntactic processing. This is true even though L2 learners have grammatical knowledge that is correct and similar to that of native speakers. In the present study, we contrasted three hypotheses, the initial inaccessibility account, the intransitivity overriding account, and the fuzzy subcategorization (...) frame account, to investigate whether L2 learner’s knowledge of intransitive verbs is in fact ignored in L2 online structural analysis. The initial inaccessibility account and the fuzzy subcategorization frame account predicted that L2 learners cannot access intransitivity information in building syntactic structures in any situation. The intransitivity overriding account predicted that intransitivity information is accessed in L2 parsing, but this process is overridden by the strong transitivity preference when a verb is followed by a noun phrase. Importantly, the intransitivity overriding account specifically predicted that L2 learners would be able to use intransitive information in online syntactic processing when a noun phrase does not appear immediately following a verb. We tested the three accounts in an eye-tracking reading experiment using filler-gap dependency structures. We manipulated verb’s transitivity information and lexically based plausibility information and tested English native speakers as a control L1 group and Japanese-English L2 participants. The results showed that L2 learners as well as native speakers processed sentences differently depending on the subcategorization information of the verb, and adopted transitive analysis only when the verb was optionally transitive, providing support for the intransitivity overriding. The results further demonstrated that L2 learners had strong expectations for the transitive structure, which is consistent with the view proposed by the hyper-active gap-filling hypothesis. In addition, the results showed that the semantic mismatch in the incorrect transitive analysis facilitated native speaker’s processing but caused difficulty for L2 learners. Together, the current study provides evidence that L2 learners use intransitive information of the verbs to guide their structural analysis when there are no overriding constraints. (shrink)

The goal of the present paper is to construct a formal explication of the pluralistic ignorance explanation of the bystander effect. The social dynamics leading to inaction is presented, decomposed, and modeled using dynamic epistemic logic augmented with ‘transition rules’ able to characterize agent behavior. Three agent types are defined: First Responders who intervene given belief of accident; City Dwellers, capturing ‘apathetic urban residents’ and Hesitators, who observe others when in doubt, basing subsequent decision on social proof. It is (...) shown how groups of the latter may end in a state of pluralistic ignorance leading to inaction. Sequential models for each agent type are specified, and their results compared to empirical studies. It is concluded that only the Hesitator model produces reasonable results. (shrink)

Ignorance is a neglected issue in philosophy. This is surprising for, contrary to what one might expect, it is not clear what ignorance is. Some philosophers say or assume that it is a lack of knowledge, whereas others claim or presuppose that it is an absence of true belief. What is one ignorant of when one is ignorant? What kinds of ignorance are there? This neglect is also remarkable because ignorance plays a crucial role in all (...) sorts of controversial societal issues. Ignorance is often thought to be a moral and legal excuse; it is a core concept in medical ethics and debates about privacy, and it features in religious traditions and debates about belief in God. This book does not only study an epistemic phenomenon that is interesting in itself, but also provides important tools that can be fruitfully used in debates within and beyond philosophy. (shrink)

Ignorance, or the lack of knowledge, appears to be steadily spreading, despite the increasing availability of information. The notion of informed ignorance herein proposed to describe the widespread position of being exposed to an abundance of information yet lacking relevant knowledge, which is tied to the exponential growth in misinformation driven by technological developments and social media. Linked to many of societies’ most looming catastrophes, from political polarization to the climate crisis, practices related to knowledge and information are (...) deemed some of the most imminent and daunting modern threats, evidenced by the latest report of the World Economic Forum, which has named misinformation the most severe short-term global risk. This paper’s epistemic perspective links the properties of today’s information culture and the ways in which it interacts with individual capacities and limitations in current technological and socio-political contexts. Such a position is analyzed through the lens of epistemic principles as a contemporary epistemic phenotype that emerges from an environment of ill-adapted and excessive information inputs and leads to a distinctive type of social injustice that is primarily epistemic in nature. While equity and accessibility are widely discussed as important contributing factors to epistemic discrepancies, other overlooked but fundamental issues underlying epistemic injustices are considered, such as information manipulation, cognitive limitations, and epistemic degradation. To effectively face this elusive threat, we propose an inclusive viewpoint that harnesses knowledge from cognitive science, science and technology studies, and social epistemology to inform a unifying theory of its main impacts and driving forces. By adjusting a modern epistemic framework to the described phenomena, we intend to contextually outline its trajectory and possible means of containment based on a shared responsibility to maintain ethical epistemic standards. In a time of international unrest and mounting civil acts of violence, it is pertinent to emphasize the ethical principles of knowledge systems and authorities and suggest policy adaptations to maintain a social contract based on the shared values of truth and freedom. (shrink)

Historically, there has been great deliberation about the limits of human knowledge. Isaac Newton, recognizing his own shortcomings, once described himself as “a boy standing on the seashore... whilst the great ocean of truth lay all underscored before me.” In _Ignorance,_ Nicholas Rescher presents a broad-ranging study that examines the manifestations, consequences, and occasional benefits of ignorance in areas of philosophy, scientific endeavor, and ordinary life. Citing philosophers, theologians, and scientists from Socrates to Steven Hawking, Rescher seeks to uncover (...) the factors that hinder our cognition. Rescher categorizes ignorance as ontologically grounded, or epistemically grounded. He then defines the basis of ignorance: inaccessible data; statistical fogs; secreted information; past data that have left no trace; future discoveries; future contingencies; vagrant predicates; and superior intelligences. Such impediments set limits to inquiry and mean that while we can always extend our existing knowledge-variability here is infinite-there are things that we will never know. Cognitive finitude also hinders our ability to assimilate more than a certain number of facts. We may acquire additional information, but lack the facility to interpret it. More information does not always increase knowledge; it may point us further down the path toward an erroneous conclusion. In light of these deficiencies, Rescher looks to the role of computers in solving problems and expanding our knowledge base, but finds limits to their reasoning capacity. As Rescher's comprehensive study concludes, ignorance itself is a fertile topic for knowledge, and recognizing the boundaries of our comprehension is where wisdom begins. (shrink)

Chalmers (2018) considers a wide range of possible responses to the meta-problem of consciousness. Among them is the ignorance hypothesis -- the view that there only appears to be a hard problem because of our inadequate conception of the physical. Although Chalmers quickly dismisses this view, I argue that it has much greater promise than he recognizes. The plausibility of the ignorance hypothesis depends on how exactly one frames the 'problem intuitions' that a solution to the meta-problem must (...) explain. I argue that problem intuitions are hybrid intuitions that encompass one's intuitive take on the phenomenal and one's intuitive take on the physical. The ignorance hypothesis undermines the second half of these hybrid intuitions. I show how the ignorance hypothesis is preferable to the alternatives and attempt to explain why there is such widespread resistance to this promising position. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss various hard cases that an account of moral ignorance should be able to deal with: ancient slave holders, Susan Wolf’s JoJo, psychopaths such as Robert Harris, and finally, moral outliers. All these agents are ignorant, but it is not at all clear that they are blameless on account of their ignorance. I argue that the discussion of this issue in recent literature has missed the complexities of these cases by focusing on the question (...) of epistemic fault. It is not clear that all blameworthy morally ignorant agents have committed an epistemic fault. There are other important issues that pull us in various directions: moral capacity, bad will, and formative circumstances. I argue that bad will is what is crucial, and moral ignorance itself can be a form of bad will. I argue that we should distinguish between two sorts of bad will, and correspondingly, two sorts of blameworthiness. Ordinary blameworthiness, requires moral knowledge, and is based on akratic action. The other kind of blameworthiness, objective blameworthiness, applies when the agent is morally ignorant, and when this indicates bad will. Objective blameworthiness can be undermined by unfortunate formative circumstances. (shrink)

We received a message about your somewhat incomprehensible attitude towards the teaching of religious studies at higher educational institutions. If your experience at Lviv University gives you a reason to conclude that there is atheism, this is far from the case. I do not have the opportunity to get into the details, but only to add to this letter our work "Academic Religious Studies," the content of which will give you an opportunity to understand what kind of problems (...) should be taught by those who are the teacher of religious studies. One can agree with you that many of those who taught atheism at one time failed to overcome themselves and realize that religious studies may be intertwined with an ideological paradigm - atheistic or theological, but it can and should be academic, the basic principles of which are objectivity, historicism, non-confessionalism, polyspectry and tolerance. (shrink)

In 1979, the Council of the European Communities declared its intention to ban battery cages for laying hens; one year later, everything about the ban is forgotten. During this preparatory year (1979-1980), all that happened is the publication of scientific reports, that is, attempts at producing knowledge as a basis for and justification of the ban decision. This paper aims at understanding to what extent ignorance and doubt were produced instead. By examining the reports, I demonstrate that there are (...) three interrelated levels of ignorance production: (1) the missions given by the Commission to scientists were ambiguous, (2) questions inherent to animal welfare sciences, such as the significant variability of their measures and results, lead to a systematic standardization, and (3) the battery cage works as a techno-scientific promise and an “obligatory passage point” where scientists and industry meet. Disciplinary identity issues therefore lead scientists to adopt a double standard about the welfare of laying hens. (shrink)

The goal of this chapter is to contribute to ignorance studies by taking advantage of the pragmatist epistemology of Peirce and Dewey, which, in my view, would be an “unfinished” business without facing sundry problems raised by ignorance studies. Five typical pragmatist claims provide the framework for this chapter. They can be endorsed by other philosophies, but their conjunction is typical of pragmatism: (1) the first is Peirce’s pragmatist maxim for clarifying our ideas, where the reference (...) to “practical bearings”, to situations, conducts and contexts, is pivotal; (2) the second is pragmatism’s focus on inquiry as a norm-governed practice, rather than on mere knowledge; (3) the third idea is their “externalism”, the conviction that mind, reason and knowledge are not properties of atomic individuals but are distributed over community of inquirers or “publics” and their environment; (4) the fourth idea is that philosophy has condemned itself to skepticism when it was looking for absolute theoretical certainties; and (5) the last claim is their rejection of the fact-value dichotomy. My own general claim is that pragmatism has under-appreciated relevance for understanding the epistemology of ignorance and its social implications, and each section explores one possible dimension – semantic, epistemic, externalist, doxastic and normative – for this contribution. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ignorance, Knowledge, and Omniscience: At and Beyond the Limits of Faith and Reason after Shinran:Reflections on The Boundaries of Knowledge in Buddhism, Christianity, and Science, with Special Attention to Dennis HirotaAmos YongAlthough published in the series Religion, Theologie und Naturwissenschaft, Paul Numrich's edited volume is really about epistemology in religion and science, in particular about human knowing in Buddhist and Christian traditions shaped by the world of science (...) on the one hand, and how such knowing might also inform scientific knowledge on the other hand.1 The panoply of positions is presented by both Buddhist and Christian thinkers.From the Buddhist side, the following arguments are sketched:• that religion and science are complementary modes of knowing and that "understanding the true nature of the physical world" opens up "the way to enlightenment" (Trinh Xuan Thuan).2• that Buddhism is both continuous with (and hence deserving of serious consideration amidst) the epistemic discourses of modernity in many respects and yet also discontinuous with (and hence capable for critically interrogating) modernity's epistemology in other respects as well (David L. McMahan).3• that a Shin Buddhist approach to human knowledge—which in this chapter is brought into dialogue with Martin Heidegger's (1889-1976) notion of truth—opens up to a Kuhnian philosophy of science that emphasizes how paradigmatic shifts occur when new perspectives replace older frameworks (Dennis Hirota).4• that the questions raised by theoretical and quantum physics provide a scientific framework for discussing fundamental epistemological, ontological, and metaphysical questions that Buddhists and Christians might otherwise disagree about (Mark T. Unno).5From the Christian side, the following theses are explored: [End Page 201]• that boundary constraints confront not only working scientists but also Buddhists and Christians, and that these constraints can thus serve as a springboard for a science and religion "trilogue" (Paul O. Ingram).6• that the mystery of creative becoming (God, in traditional Christian terms) is the dynamic backdrop to the ongoing human quest for knowledge (Gordon D. Kaufman).7• that it is at the boundaries of knowledge that genuine creativity occurs (not only scientific creativity but also theological creativity emerges, i.e., the apophatic tradition of Eastern Orthodoxy or the theory of coincidentia oppositorum of Nicholas of Cusa [1401-1464]), and where, as a result of such creative approaches, distinct fields of inquiry open up and different domains of knowledge emerge (Antje Jackelén).8• that theological discourse is paradoxical precisely because such discourse marks the fluid boundaries demarcating sense and nonsense (Tom Christenson).9And, befitting a volume on the encounter between religion (i.e., Buddhism and Christianity) and science, there is a concluding chapter from a physicist on the limits of scientific knowledge that both is encouraged by the gains made by science (presuming a critical realist approach to science's modeling of reality) and yet also is honest about there being much more to learn on small and big questions (John R. Albright).10The foregoing summaries do not do justice to the complexity and sophistication of the chapters in the book. However, they provide a broader context for my interactions with Dennis Hirota's chapter on Shinran's (1173-1263) epistemology and its implications for both religious and scientific knowledge. As an evangelical Christian, I am particularly intrigued by the challenges confronting a Shin Buddhist approach to the sciences, even as I am hopeful that such a consideration will precipitate creative insights both for the Buddhist-Christian encounter and for the religion-science dialogue. I am all the more motivated since I have long been convinced that the religion-science dialogue has been dominated by generically religious approaches and that it is time for more particularistic or even confessional positions to be registered in the discussion.11 I am optimistic that the specificity of the Shin tradition will provide both complementary and contrasting perspectives to the contemporary Buddhist encounter with science that has so far been dominated by the broadly Tibetan approaches of His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama (1935-) and those in his circle of dialogue partners,12 and that this will in turn open up new trajectories—even initiate new paradigms, as Hirota suggests—for the Buddhist... (shrink)

Knowledge and Ignorance of Self in Platonic Philosophy is the first volume of essays dedicated to the whole question of self-knowledge and its role in Platonic philosophy. It brings together established and rising scholars from every interpretative school of Plato studies, and a variety of texts from across Plato's corpus - including the classic discussions of self-knowledge in the Charmides and Alcibiades I, and dialogues such as the Republic, Theaetetus, and Theages, which are not often enough mined for (...) insights about this crucial philosophical topic. The rich variety of readings and hermeneutical methods allows for an encompassing view of the relevant scholarly debates. The volume is intended to serve as a standard resource for further research on Plato's treatment of self-knowledge, and will highlight the relevance of Plato's thought to contemporary debates on selfhood, self-reflection and subjectivity. (shrink)

In this paper the phenomenon of pluralistic ignorance is discussed and it is argued why it is of relevance for epistemic logic and social psychology. Roughly put, pluralistic ignorance is the case when a group of interacting agents all experience a discrepancy between their private opinions and the perceived opinions of the others. After introducing the phenomenon, numerous features of pluralistic ignorance that are of interest for epistemic logic and social epistemology, are discussed. This discussion serves two (...) purposes: It recaps the existing research on pluralistic ignorance within epistemic logic and social epistemology, while at the same time stating open problems for social epistemology and epistemic logic that pertains to the study of pluralistic ignorance. Finally, it is argued that the features of pluralistic ignorance of interest to epistemic logic and social epistemology relate to general features of information dynamics in situations of social interaction. (shrink)

This book addresses two questions that are highly relevant for epistemology and for society: What is ignorance and how should we rationally deal with it? It proposes a new way of thinking about ignorance based on contemporary and historical philosophical theories. In the first part of the book, the author shows that epistemological definitions of ignorance are quite heterogeneous and often address different phenomena under the label "ignorance." She then develops an integrated conception of ignorance (...) that recognizes doxastic, attitudinal, and structural constituents of ignorance. Based on this new conception, she carves out suggestions for dealing with ignorance from the history of philosophy that have largely been overlooked: virtue-theoretic approaches based on Aristotle and Socrates, consequentialist approaches derived from James, and deontological approaches based on Locke, Clifford, and Kant. None of these approaches individually provide a satisfying approach to the task of rationally dealing with ignorance, and so the author develops an alternative maxim-based answer that extends Kant’s maxims of the sensus communis to the issue of ignorance. The last part of the book applies this maxim-based answer to different contexts in medicine and democracies. How Should We Rationally Deal with Ignorance? will appeal to scholars and advanced students working in epistemology, political philosophy, feminist philosophy, and the social sciences. (shrink)

In this article I am concerned with how relatively privileged people who wish to act in anti-oppressive ways respond to their own ignorance in ways that fall short of what is necessary for building coalitions against oppression. I consider María Lugones's sense of “world”-travel and José Medina's notion of epistemic friction-seeking as strategies for combating privileged ignorance, and assess how well they fare when put into practice by those suffering from privileged ignorance. Drawing on the resources of (...) tourism studies, I critique the political and material context that can turn these attempts to “world”-travel or seek epistemic friction into a morally and epistemically problematic epistemic tourism. Centrally, I argue that trying to learn what it's like to experience oppression is not an effective method of counteracting privileged ignorance, since the epistemic vices and cognitive distortions that created the ignorance in the first place continue to influence knowledge-creation even after they are acknowledged. Rather than attempting to understand “what it's like” to experience oppression, privileged progressives should undertake to learn about the provenance and purpose of their ignorance and the structures of oppression that facilitate and are facilitated by that ignorance. (shrink)

As scientific research moves increasingly to the private sector, the social organization of science undergoes important transformations. Focusing on the production of ignorance, agnotology has been a fruitful approach to understanding the social and epistemic consequences of the recent commercialization of scientific research. Despite their important contributions, scholars working on agnotology seem to hold implicit normative commitments that are in tension with their descriptive accounts of ignorance-constructive practices. The main aim of this article is to uncover these commitments (...) and to expose the emerging tensions. Thus, this article begins an exploration into normative aspects of the studies of ignorance. In particular, it shows that agnotology still needs the support of a well-articulated normative approach capable of identifying and evaluating the epistemic and social concerns raised by the private funding and performance of science. (shrink)

Modal arguments like the Knowledge Argument, the Conceivability Argument and the Inverted Spectrum Argument could be used to argue for experiential primitivism; the view that experiential truths aren’t entailed from nonexperiential truths. A way to resist these arguments is to follow Stoljar (Ignorance and imagination. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006) and plead ignorance of a type of experience-relevant nonexperiential truth. If we are ignorant of such a truth, we can’t imagine or conceive of the various sorts of scenarios (...) that are required to make these arguments sound. While I am sympathetic to this response, in this article I will argue that we have good reason to believe that this particular ignorance hypothesis is false. (shrink)

“Ignorance” is receiving an increased amount of philosophical attention. The study of it even has its own name, “agnotology.” Some ignorance remains simply a case of not having enough information, but increasingly philosophers are recognizing a whole other type of ignorance, one that is socially constructed and often actively promoted. In the first section of this paper I examine perhaps the best known type of socially constructed ignorance, “white ignorance.” White ignorance reflects a lack (...) of genuine understanding of the social realities of others and it creates injustice. In the second section of the paper, I consider what it means to “genuinely understand,” arguing that when it comes to issues of justice those with epistemic power have a moral obligation to at least attempt to understand others’ social realities. (shrink)

Objectives: To assess the knowledge and behaviour of researchers regarding criteria for authorship, and the practices of ghost and gift authorship. Design: Semidirective interviews of senior clinical researchers. Setting: University hospital. Participants: Thirty-nine main investigators of clinical research programmes. Main measurements: Awareness and use of International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) criteria for authorship, and perceptions about ghost and gift authorship. Results: A total of 48 protocols submitted by 42 principal investigators between 1994 and 1996 were identified. Thirty-nine investigators (...) were contacted; 37 (one of whom delegated a co-author) were interviewed between May 2002 and March 2003. Two co-authors of two principal investigators were also interviewed. In all, 42 studies were represented. The interviews lasted for 40–90 minutes and were conducted with openness and respect for confidentiality. The choice of names of co-authors did not follow the ICMJE recommendations. Half of the respondents stated they were aware of criteria for authorship and knew of ICMJE, but most of them did not cite any of the ICMJE criteria among those they applied in deciding authorship. Most of them disagreed with the obligation to meet the three criteria justifying co-authorship because they found these too rigid and inapplicable. Gift authorship was a common practice; 59% of the respondents had been a recipient of gift authorship. Twenty-five (64%) were aware of ghost authorship and the majority considered it questionable and blameworthy. Conclusions: The ICMJE criteria were ignored by clinicians at a university hospital. Ghost and gift authorship were frequent among them. There is a need for French guidelines for authorship to be prepared and implemented. (shrink)

It has recently been argued that a person’s moral judgments (about both their own and others’ actions) are constrained by the nature and extent of their relevant ignorance and, thus, that such judgments are determined in the first instance by the person’s epistemic circumstances. It has been argued, in other words, that the epistemic is logically prior to other normative (e.g., ethical, prudential, pecuniary) considerations in human decision-making, that these other normative considerations figure in decision-making only after (logically and (...) temporally) relevant ignorance has constrained the decision-maker’s menu of options. If this is right, then a person’s moral judgments in some set of circumstances should vary with their knowledge and ignorance of these circumstances. In this study, we test the hypothesis of the logical priority of the epistemic. We describe two experiments in which subjects’ knowledge and ignorance of relevant consequences were manipulated. In the second experiment, we also compared the effect of ignorance on moral judgments with that of personal force, a factor previously shown to influence moral judgments. We found broad empirical support for the armchair arguments that epistemic considerations are logically prior to normative considerations. (shrink)

Abstract: Pluralistic ignorance is a nasty informational phenomenon widely studied in social psychology and theoretical economics. It revolves around conditions under which it is "legitimate" for everyone to remain ignorant. In formal epistemology there is enough machinery to model and resolve situations in which pluralistic ignorance may arise. Here is a simple first stab at recovering from pluralistic ignorance by means of knowledge transmissibility.

Inconsistency toleration is the phenomenon of working with inconsistent information without threatening one’s rationality. Here I address the role that ignorance plays for the tolerance of contradictions in the empirical sciences. In particular, I contend that there are two types of ignorance that, when present, can make epistemic agents to be rationally inclined to tolerate a contradiction. The first is factual ignorance, understood as temporary undecidability of the truth values of the conflicting propositions. The second is what (...) I call “ignorance of theoretical structure”, which is lack of knowledge of relevant inference patterns within a specific theory. I argue that these two types of ignorance can be explanatory of the scientists’ rational disposition to be tolerant towards contradictions, and I illustrate this with a case study from neutrino physics. (shrink)

This paper links two domains of recent interest in science and technology studies, complexity and ignorance, in the context of knowledge practices observed among synthetic biologists. Synthetic biologists are recruiting concepts and methods from computer science and electrical engineering in order to design and construct novel organisms in the lab. Their field has taken shape amidst revised assessments of life’s complexity in the aftermath of the Human Genome Project. While this complexity is commonly taken to be an immanent (...) property of biological systems, this article presents an epistemological view of complexity according to which complexity relates to a specific scientific theory or model and refers to that which exceeds the theory or model’s explanatory power. This epistemological view allows us to narrate a particular story about the changing relationship between biology and synthetic biology in the last decade and accounts for early knowledge practices in synthetic biology that “ignored” biology. This article further argues that while the failure of ignorance to produce clear-cut results for synthetic biologists has led practitioners back to biology, the entanglements between different pragmatic orientations and ways of knowing trouble the implications of this return for assessments of the complexity of biological systems. (shrink)

This book addresses two questions that are highly relevant for epistemology and for society: What is ignorance and how should we rationally deal with it? It proposes a new way of thinking about ignorance based on contemporary and historical philosophical theories. In the first part of the book, the author shows that epistemological definitions of ignorance are quite heterogeneous and often address different phenomena under the label 'ignorance'. She then develops an integrated conception of ignorance (...) that recognizes doxastic, attitudinal and structural constituents of ignorance. Based on this new conception, she carves out suggestions for dealing with ignorance from the history of philosophy that have largely been overlooked: virtue-theoretic approaches based on Aristotle and Socrates, consequentialist approaches derived from James and deontological approaches based on Locke, Clifford and Kant. None of these approaches individually provide a satisfying approach to the task of rationally dealing with ignorance and so the author develops an alternative maxim-based answer that extends Kant's maxims of the sensus communis to the issue of ignorance. The last part of the book applies this maxim-based answer to different contexts in medicine and democracies. How Should We Rationally Deal with Ignorance? will appeal to scholars and advanced students working in epistemology, political philosophy, feminist philosophy and the social sciences. (shrink)